Can those people who chose IRC comment on what their prefferred alternative would be? Given that sad state of our Freenode IRC we probably need to look for an alternative.So far I was hoping the spam wave would stop at some point

Good news. Then this will probably be implemented soonish (I got most of the infrastructure in place, just need to find the time to link it all up). First stand-alone, but there is also an (outdated) plugin for Hubzilla (what runs on https://social.freegamedev.net).

The idea is to have a FreeGameDev specific MUC (Multi User Chat) that you can join with any XMPP account & client (the webclient above is only optional). I am also trying to enable to have a free XMPP account for every user from us, but linking that to the existing database is a bit tricky. Right now my idea is to link it to the Hubzilla user database, so you will have to create an new account there (any future updated forum software will likely be linked back to our Hubzilla also, so get your favourite username now ).

With the already running Bitlbee it is then also possible to join this XMPP MUC also with your favorite IRC client if that is preferred by you (but you need to follow the instructions inside Bitlbee on how to set up your XMPP/Jabber account for the bridge to work... but if you are still using IRC, you should be able to manage that )

In the further away future we can also link this XMPP MUC to other group chats such as Steam Groups, Discord, Slack, IRC etc. via Matterbridge, but I have not investigated that much.

Julius {l Wrote}:Can those people who chose IRC comment on what their prefferred alternative would be?

Being an IRC user, I haven't a deep knowledge about XMPP and Matrix. Anyway, my feeling is that the current preferred paradigm is towards "media rich" chat systems (e.g. Slack, Discord, ...), so maybe Matrix could match it better imho.

XMPP can be media-rich It has a reputation for being old and limited like IRC, but with the right client that really isn't true for both. You can test the linked above Conversejs as an example, but Movim.eu is probably even a bit nicer as a web-client.

The problem with [Matrix] is that while the frontend web-client client (Riot.im) is nice, the currently available server backend (Synapse) is truly horrendous in regards to performance, database size creep and ram usage. There are also very few nice mobile and desktop clients that don't rely on electron bloatware. So as much as I wanted to run Matrix initially also, it is really totally out of question by now.

Small update: I managed to connect the https://social.freegamedev.net Hubzilla user database to my Ejabberd XMPP server (with a bit of an ugly hack I hope to replace that in the future with an proper OAuth2 connection), so hopefully I can enable that very soon for everyone. Now I need to wrestle with DNS and see if I can get XMPP also to work with the same channel name e.g. in my case that would be "poVoq@social.freegamedev.net" (hoping that that will not interfere with the ActivityPub webfinger stuff). But otherwise something like "poVoq@xmpp.freegamedev.net" will work for sure.

qudobup is collecting Discord open-source game channels here: https://discord.gg/usAHQdzSeems like a good opportunity to link them up via Matterbridge to XMPP (and maybe IRC, but the spam there is still strong).

Yeah, but it's easy, popular and convenient and doesn't belong to one of the main data-mining companies (yet). So lets engage them where they are and offer bridges (practically and metaphorically) to truly Free services

Edit: It is partially owned by Tencent, which I guess can be filed under data-mining (or worse)

Interesting stuff happening over at Matrix.org.They got a XMPP and Discord bridge now, and apparently their memory and diskspace hogging Synapse server isn't that bad anymore. Also some nice non-JavaScript clients in the works.

If you already have a XMPP account somewhere you can now try the web-chat based on ConverseJS here:https://chat.freegamedev.net/(uses Javascript of course )Edit: turns out this only works with accounts from xmpp.freegamedev.net due to technical limitations I didn't know about.

Still in testing mode, but you should now be able to use your channel name & password from social.freegamedev.net to log in with any XMPP client, including the webclient on https://chat.freegamedev.net/ (edit: only works with these accounts, not other xmpp server accounts).

The second one is obviously much more basic than Bitlebee, but it should allow very easy and configuration free connection to XMPP MUCs with any IRC client.

It also doesn't deal with accounts etc. which from a privacy and data security perspective is also much preferable. Should somewhat increase the spam risk though.

Edit: I should say that for maintenance and a few other reasons I am not planning to run an IRC daemon directly. So for those that voted IRC in this poll the above options would be a convenient/only way to join the XMPP MUCs with an IRC client.

Turns out the ConverseJS that I put on chat.freegamedev.net only works with xmpp accounts from xmpp.freegamedev.net due to some technical limitation I was not aware of until now.There are some solutions to it, but none easy or quick it seems.So I am rethinking the webchat options... maybe we try Movim after all as that works with any account for sure.

Also, XMPP E2EE via OMEMO should work with the right client: http://omemo.top/Personally I use Gajim (on Linux) and Conversations (on Android).But Dino looks like a really cool upcoming client. Otherwise Kaidan is interesting because it is cross platform and also brand new.I also recently tried Yaxim, which doesn't support OMEMO yet, but is otherwise a quite nice (albeit not so fancy looking) Android client.

Last but not least the Movim app is (for an electron wrapper) really fast and nice. But it requires a Movim server in between, which I have not yet setup again (but are planning to).